


Unfit for Duty

by tortuosity



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Alcohol, Angst, Authority Figures, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Doubt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-20 00:47:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20666549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortuosity/pseuds/tortuosity
Summary: Alone in her office late at night, Aveline questions her own authority and involvement in several of Kirkwall's most heinous tragedies. Takes place shortly after the end of Act 2, before Act 3.





	Unfit for Duty

**Author's Note:**

> Aveline is not a beloved character in many parts of the DA fandom. She makes some terrible mistakes as a member and leader of Kirkwall's guard, mistakes that never feel like they're properly addressed in-game. Many have derided her as hypocritical, incompetent, and blind. And maybe they're right. She's heavily flawed, to be sure.
> 
> I admit to having a soft spot for Aveline despite all this. I find her fascinating for all the reasons people hate her, which led me to write this one shot. Aveline is a private person, hiding both her grief and her joy. We don't get to see much of her doubts, if she has them, especially on a friendship path (which seems counter-intuitive to me, but I'll save my ranting about the friendship/rivalry system for some other time). I wanted to explore inside her head a bit. I hope I've done her justice.
> 
> **Content warnings for alcohol use, mentions of rape and murder**

Aveline doesn’t drink. Not often, anyway. Alcohol to the brain is like a sword without a whetstone, and she needs to be sharp, needs to react efficiently. Can’t afford to be sluggish, slurring, irresponsible. She’s seen what happens to people lost in drink. They litter her jail cells night after night, crying and puking and shaking. Then they sober up, promise to quit, and land right back in the tank the next night. One of the many, many things she can’t fix.

It feels like standing in front of a crumbling dam and jamming her fingers in the holes.

Aveline doesn’t drink, but there’s a bottle of wine on the desk in front of her that’s almost empty. The guard isn’t supposed to use commandeered property, but there’s nothing in the regs saying what to do with it once it’s been confiscated, only that it’s meant to be held as “evidence.” There’s a whole room in the barracks stacked floor-to-ceiling with bottles of evidence. She knows the guards sneak in there to swipe nips or even whole bottles at a time. They’re not supposed to. They know they’re not supposed to, because she makes every new recruit read the regs, top to bottom. A book the width of her spread fingers, heavy as a brick. But she can’t fool herself. They don’t read it. They don’t care. And if they don’t care, why should she?

No. She should care. The world is full of too many people who don’t.

But it’s just a book. A book she worships, preaches like Andrastians with their Chant of Light. It’s a comfort. Go here, do that. Don’t worry about thinking; another guard captain handled that a hundred years ago. Every punishment for every crime. Though it’s a sparse section, there are rules for disciplining wayward guards. And there is a singular sentence for unfit guard captains:

_Should the Captain of the Guard be considered incompetent or otherwise unfit for their duties by both a majority of guardsmen and the Viscount, they may be removed from office, with or without notification in writing._

She can recite it by heart. It was the sentence she leveraged to depose Jeven. And perhaps, she thinks ruefully, she should be glad her guardsmen don’t give a fig about the regs, because then they might choose to depose her, too.

Maybe she deserves it.

Due process. Presumption of innocence. Burden of proof. Check all these boxes and you are correct. Not just correct, but _right_, in every sense of the word. The boxes weren’t checked for Leandra’s killer. Aveline wanted them to be. Maker, did she want them to be. When she chose to trust her heart instead of the law and raid Gaspard DuPuis’s manor on the words of an overzealous templar, she wanted to be right. But hearts are fickle things, and when they earned nothing for their investigation save Meredith’s scorn for their “misuse of authority,” Aveline vowed to lock hers away from then on. 

“Evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.” That is what the law requires, and that is what they did not have. They had a handful of dead women in a city where new corpses turn up daily, bodies both fresh and disfigured by rot. Nearly all remain unidentified; they get burned in piles or buried in unmarked graves and then forgotten. What was a few more?

She takes another drink and wonders when she became so jaded.

Everything is always clearer in hindsight. Now there are lines linking each of the deceased to each other, to DuPuis, to Quentin, lines so damned bright they’re almost blinding—accusatory in their blatancy.

“Useless,” she says. The bottle in front of her begins to slide out of focus, so unlike those lines, still brutally sharp in her mind.

Those lines all lead to Leandra, to all those other women. They were the sutures holding their parts together. 

Aveline did not give the killer a fair trial. She wasn’t thinking about the law when she ran her sword through his gut. It seemed so small, so inconsequential compared to the feeling of her heart exploding from the cage she sealed it in, the world as she knew it collapsing beneath her feet.

And when they emerged from that basement, she packed all her grief and hurt away and clung to the law, to her book, like a baby to a wet nurse. She was ready to wield it as her shield against any criticism. Even if she deserved it. No, even _though_ she deserved it.

Hawke could have blamed her, should have blamed her. But she didn’t. After her mother’s death, she sat in her empty estate and told everyone she was fine until she was, and the two of them never spoke of it again.

Order. Discipline. Loyalty. Chevalier words, instilled in her by her father. Words that used to guide her, but since Wesley’s death, they bind her, the only thing she has in a world that refuses to just _make sense_. Those words rang in her ears when she signed up for the guard. A chance to protect, a chance to do the right thing, a chance to make amends for her failures. And all she had to do was what she does best—follow orders. It was simple. Keep the good people safe. Lock the bad people away.

The day she was promoted to Guard Captain was the happiest day of her life. Even more than her wedding. It felt like acknowledgement, like affirmation. This was her reward for rooting out corruption. She was different than Jeven. She would make the guard respectable again. So full of hope and pride. 

But corruption in Kirkwall is as inherent as its chokedamp, and she was a fool to think she could remove it. She is a fool to think her obsession with order and discipline and loyalty makes her immune. That sickness flourished right under her nose, but even when it was shoved in her face, she turned her head to the side and let her book do the talking. Maybe she is infected with it, too.

_There have been rumors. I will investigate._ What good are those words? The accused was murdered and she cannot interrogate a corpse. Helpless. What is she to do when her heart says “believe” but the law says “doubt?” The elves went to her lieutenants, and her lieutenants listened to the law. They doubted. They wrote down the complaints and put them on a desk somewhere, stacked up alongside hundreds of others. What was one more rape, after all? Put it beside the reports of dead women. When the guard’s body was found mutilated in the alienage, those “rumors” finally reached her ears, and she had never wanted to be deaf so badly in her life.

The regs have pages and pages on what to do with murderers. They have nothing on what to do when murderers join a cult for protection. But she still tried to cram that new situation into old holes. She babbled over and over how murder is wrong, there is no excuse, you can’t take the law into your own hands. As if she hasn’t watched Hawke do just that dozens of times over the last four years. As if she hasn’t done it herself.

“Bloody hypocrite.” Her head swims in riptides of red wine.

And she stood in front of that great horned beast and waved her laws at him like he was one of her guards. Remembering it makes her stomach lurch. Her home once more under threat by foreign monsters, and all she could do was bleat about rules, a fattened sheep ready for slaughter. 

It makes her think of darkspawn, of running from Lothering. She thinks about Wesley, the darkspawn blood coating his face and armor likely beginning to kill him before they even left the village. She remembers the way he looked at Bethany Hawke, the way his eyes widened when he saw fire burst from her hands, the way he grasped at his templar training with a dying man’s desperation.

_The Order dictates…_

_The Qun demands…_

_The law says…_

Perhaps Isabela is right. Perhaps it’s all bullshit. But she’s gone. She left for Maker-knows-where while Hawke was bleeding out in the viscount’s throne room because of the Qun’s demands. 

Or maybe because of Aveline’s laws.

“No.” She drags the bottle to her lips. It wasn’t her fault.

Hawke is alive, at least, and on her feet, though she seems dead inside, a ghost taking refuge in a human body. Meredith wants to name her Champion, and Hawke will accept, because she is a responsible sort despite her disrespect for rules and regulations. And perhaps that responsibility will crush her the way it is crushing Aveline. One of the few things they have in common.

Is it right to keep her post? She stares at her bottle of commandeered wine like it will give her an answer. If she can’t adequately perform her duties… her guardsmen could remove her, or perhaps Meredith, since the death of Viscount Dumar seems to have granted the Knight-Commander far more reach than she ought to have. Aveline’s guard is loyal, though, and they won’t move to depose her. And she’s proven a useful enough tool for Meredith; she doubts the Knight-Commander’s paranoia would allow the risk of a new guard captain.

No, she won’t be forced out. She would have to step down, leave the guard entirely, let some other sorry bastard fill her shoes. One with stars in their eyes like she used to have. But what else can she do? Join the Templars? Not in Kirkwall, not after how they’ve treated her. She can’t go back to Ferelden’s army. And those ideals she insists on clinging to preclude her from mercenary work. Is she only left with being a housewife? Raising Donnic’s children? Furious tears sting her eyes at the mere thought of it. She has nothing else, nothing else but this wretched title.

She has a patrol in the morning. The wine is gone, and the consequences will be painful. It doesn’t matter. She’s harangued enough guardsmen for showing up to patrols hungover; how fitting if she does it, too. Sluggish, slurring, irresponsible.

Incompetent. Unfit.


End file.
